Berry Gordy

Michael Masser, whose hit-making collaborations with Whitney Houston and Diana Ross helped catapult the pop divas to new heights and propelled him to songwriting fame, has died at his home in Rancho Mirage. He was 74. A stockbroker before switching to music, Masser died July 9 and had been deteriorating since a stroke three years ago, said Kurt Vitolo, his business manager. Masser composed lush melodies that brought a universal sweep to lyrics of songs with widely disparate points of view, including "Saving All My Love for You," which depicts Houston as a woman in a dead-end affair with a married man, and "The Greatest Love of All," which he wrote with Linda Creed for...

Related "Berry Gordy" Articles

Michael Masser, whose hit-making collaborations with Whitney Houston and Diana Ross helped catapult the pop divas to new heights and propelled him to songwriting fame, has died at his home in Rancho Mirage. He was 74.
A stockbroker before switching to...

Edna Anderson-Owens, the longtime assistant to Motown founder Berry Gordy, has died. She was 76.
A Gordy confidant portrayed in the Broadway show "Motown: The Musical," Anderson-Owens died June 13 at a Los Angeles hospital after complications...

The story of Motown Records is a rich and important one. It's not only the rags-to-riches story of a record label that rose out of inner-city Detroit to become a cornerstone in the foundation of postwar American music, but one in which a body of work...

Motown Records didn't release every indelible pop-soul hit from the '60s and '70s, although sometimes that's how it seemed. The Drifters' "On Broadway," for example, was one that got away, to Atlantic. Berry Gordy, the Detroit auto plant worker,...

An unlikely act stole the show last month at the annual all-star gala Clive Davis hosts the night before the Grammy Awards.
As usual, the veteran producer and record executive had assembled a cast of hot young hitmakers — among them Sam Smith, Pharrell...

Whitney Houston's star power continues to be a surefire attraction as evidenced by the A-list celebrities at Tuesday's premiere of "Whitney," Lifetime's upcoming original biopic of the late singer that marks the directorial debut of...

Any suspicions that soul singer Jimmy Ruffin might have harbored hard feelings after his younger brother, David, snatched one of the great gigs in 1960s pop music out of his hands would have been dispelled when the siblings came together in 1970 to...

George Clinton's memoir features aliens, spaceships, George W. Bush, grown men wearing diapers and platform shoes, and a wealth of stories about some of the seminal music Clinton and his collaborators in the Parliament-Funkadelic collective have made...

It’s not often that you hear about assassination attempts linked to book proposals. Writing a book pitch, after all, is a notoriously quixotic thing to do. Publishers routinely "kill" books simply by rejecting them. And Americans are so...

In early 1964 a friend called me up and asked if I wanted to hear the new Beatles album, "With the Beatles." It had come out in Britain a couple of months before, but no one I knew had heard it, or for that matter heard of it. My friend's...

They'll be dancing in the streets of Oakland on Monday (today) toasting Berry Gordy, the man who created Motown Records in Detroit. Alameda County invites the public to celebrate Berry Gordy Day in the East Bay with an event that features the legendary...

An exhibit featuring an urn filled with the late DJ Alan Freed’s ashes was recently removed from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, just a week or so after Beyoncé’s wardrobe moved in.
The overlapping events birthed the idea...

Lucian Grainge has a vision for the future of the music business that bears scant resemblance to the traditional record company playbook.
He is putting songs on smartphones in Africa, reviving moribund American record labels and making Lorde into a...

On one level, it was no surprise that veteran record company executive Gil Friesen was drawn to the theme of "20 Feet From Stardom," the film about backup singers that won the Oscar for documentary feature Sunday night.
Friesen, longtime...

Anna Gordy Gaye, the sister of the founder of Motown Records and ex-wife of musical great Marvin Gaye, with whom she wrote a number of hit songs, died of natural causes Friday at her Los Angeles home, her family said. She was 92.
Gordy Gaye was an...